In the wake of Ferguson, Missouri teen Michael Brown’s shooting death following a confrontation with local police, two reporters, one with the Washington Post and another with the Huffington Post, were arrested by officials for failing to follow police orders as the town continues to deal with ongoing violence and looting.
Following the arrest of Wesley Lowery, an African American reporter for the Washington Post, and later the arrest of Ryan Kelly, a white reporter for the Huffington Post, MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell sent out a tweet on Wednesday, August 13 asking if Lowery was “detained for reporting while black?”
As Mediate pointed out “as the Washington Examiner‘s Becket Adams rightly notes, however, around the same time Lowery was arrested, Huffington Post reporter Ryan Reilly, who is white, was also arrested. Reilly was arrested, more or less, for the same reason as Lowery.”
As of this posting, Mitchell, who serves as NBC News Chief Foreign Affairs Correspondent, has yet to offer an explanation or an apology for suggesting that a Washington Post reporter was arrested simply because he was black. However, she has found time to issue a correction from an erroneous statement she made during her Andrea Mitchell Reports program on Thursday, in which she incorrectly paraphrased comments made by Governor Jay Nixon (D-Mo.):
Will NBC hold one of their veteran journalists responsible for such a flippant tweet? Stay tuned to find out.
